The toothbrush is still the essential and most reliable aid for indispensable dental hygiene. When using a brush to clean teeth, however, pressure is always exerted on the teeth with the bristles and thus unavoidably also on the gums. This pressure is measured out only with difficulty by human sensation and the hand, so that on one hand, a sufficient cleaning of the teeth and their gaps is brought about, and on the other hand, the gums are not injured by excessively high pressure.
Toothbrushes available on the market, with an elastic brush head and as described, for example, in European Patent No. 0,371,293 A2, do not provide any remedy here since they are constructed in such a manner that the bristle head gives way with the pressure exerted, but the bristle surface is inclined away from the bristle head. This means that when pressure is exerted on the bristle head, the one-sided bristles are inclined away from the cleaning surface, but via the bristles on the side of the handle, the same unreduced pressure is exerted on a substantially smaller bristle surface. These toothbrushes are therefore not to be considered as an improvement but rather are to be evaluated as disadvantageous, since the risk of injury to the gums is not reduced, but rather is even increased by a smaller effective area of the bristle tips.
European Patent No. 0,339,350 A1 describes a toothbrush whose brush head can be moved by a two-part handle, consisting of an upper part and a lower part, in such a way that the surface of the brush head can assume various angles with respect to the handle. The disadvantage of this brush consists in the fact that the inclination must by adjusted by the hand and there is no way of avoiding that either the bristles close to the handle or those of the tip of the brush are pressed more on the teeth and that therefore, there is no uniform pressure distribution over the entire bristle surface. Furthermore, a considerable application of force by the hand, which cannot be controlled and measured out for the desirable purpose, is required to change the angle of inclination.